Do you talk to your mother like that? Twitter users say 'slut' and 'whore' a LOT, study finds

A UK think tank reveals just how often people hurl the terms "slut" and "whore" on Twitter.

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To the surprise of absolutely no one, people throw around the words "slut" and "whore" a lot on Twitter.

An update of a 2014 study conducted by UK think tank Demos revealed that during a three-week period, Twitter users from the UK sent 10,000 "explicitly aggressive and misogynistic tweets" to 6,500 unique users. As The Washington Post pointed out, that comes down to about every 10 seconds in which someone calls someone a slut or a whore on the social media site.

The report also found that internationally, 200,000 aggressive tweets that mentioned the terms were sent to 80,000 people during the same period.

Keep in mind that Demos was able to differentiate tweets that used the terms in harmful or abusive ways, from ones that didn't. The tallies above don't take into account instances when people used the words to refer to themselves, or related to issues of misogyny (for example, using the word "slut" in reference to "slut shaming" or "slut walks.")

In addition, the new research found that women were as likely as men to use the terms. This is consistent with Demos' 2014 findings in which "women are increasingly more inclined to engage in discourses using the same language that has been, and continues to be, used as derogatory against them."